Seymour Totti’s Foreign Policy

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I first encountered Yadong some years ago in Bangkok since then I’ve been very careful to avoid it. But the other evening I met a compatriot of mine who was tucking into a bottle with all the enthusiasm of someone who has never tried it before. The bottle didn’t say Yadong, it had the label of a well known energy drink. Not a big bottle but big enough.

He offered me a shot. I asked the barman, a man who I’ve known for sometime, what he thought was in it. “Lao kao and some Chinese herbs and medicine.” he replied.

“It’s got snakes and scorpions and bat’s dick!” Interjected the girl who was working alongside him.

“No it hasn’t,” he laughed, “they only say that to farang (foreigners)”

“You don’t know for sure.” she insisted. It was true he didn’t.

Lao kao is a locally and probably illegally made rice whiskey. Commercial variants would include Mekhong and Sang Som but what the locals call lao kao is produced at village level.

It starts off as a milky white rice wine called satoh. This is cheap and plentiful around the villages of north-east of Thailand. It’s also very easy to make. Cooked rice is mixed with a mold called pang satoh and left to ferment in an urn called a hai. The finished brew is sweet and pleasant tasting. Traditionally the family would drink directly from the hai by means of a bamboo straw.

Lao kao is distilled satoh. It doesn’t taste so good to an untrained palette. Thais get around this by mixing it with flagons of Coke or soda.

Another alternative is Yadong. This involves dunking a cheesecloth containing additional ingredients into it and leaving it to soak for a few days. The result is not just another liqueur it is medicine! Yadong is frequently billed as possessing rare magical properties that can deal with almost any distemper you happen to be afflicted with.

What those additional ingredients might include no one seemed to know. A tour pharmacies around Bangkok’s Chinatown revealed only that there are probably as many recipes as there are problems in the world. They are all trade secrets but if you drink enough of it your problems will magically disappear. For a while at least.

Yadong is served in a shot glass and a popular accompaniment is sour green mango slices dipped in a mix of sugar and dried chilli. The mango is really quite good.

As for snakes and scorpions and bat’s dicks, well, why not?. Just down the road from the bar a stall was selling deep fried grasshoppers, maggots and beetles. In parts of Cambodia tarantula is a delicacy. The Chinese believe that the blood and gall bladder of snakes, preferably cobra, is a powerful aphrodisiac. I saw this up close in Taipei’s notorious snake alley before it was cleaned up (I think the adjacent red light district is still there).

I accepted the shot. It tastes good but I refuse the second. “Go on,” he says “this stuff costs next to nothing.” Aye, I think, say that in the morning when you are suffering the mother of all hangovers.

See also: Bar snacks in Bangkok